Short stroking aims to minimize performance-eating head repositioning delays by reducing the number of tracks used per hard drive. In a simple example, a terabyte hard drive (1,000 GB) may be based on three platters with 333 GB storage capacity each. If we were to use only 10% of the storage medium, starting with the outer sectors of the drive (which provide the best performance), the hard drive would have to deal with significantly fewer head movements.

The result of short stroking is always significantly reduced capacity. In this example, the terabyte drive would be limited to 33 GB per platter and hence only offer a total capacity of 100 GB. But the result should be noticeably shorter access times and much improved I/O performance, as the drive can operate with a minimum amount of physical activity.

It's an interesting concept - this makes a platter hdd able to compete with a flash hdd for speed and win.

If this goes mainstream, maybe manufacturers might start making "ring disks" which are disks with the media only on the outermost edge of the platter and the rest of the platter is blank glass or aluminum.